The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles - Author Biography - LitLovers • Where—Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK • Education—University of Edinburg; B.A. Oxford University • Awards—Silver Pen Award John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times (of London) named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles. Gladys Richards belonged to an Essex family originally from London as well. The Richards family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea during 1918, as Spanish Flu swept through Europe, for Essex was said to have a healthy climate. Robert met Gladys Richards at a tennis club in Westcliff-on-Sea during 1924. Though she was ten years younger, and he in bad health from the World War I, they were married a year later on 18 June 1925. Nine months and two weeks later Gladys gave birth to John Robert Fowles.

Fowles spent his childhood attended by his mother and by his cousin Peggy Fowles, 18 years old at the time of his birth, who was his nursemaid and close companion for ten years. Fowles attended Alleyn Court Preparatory School. The work of Richard Jefferies and his character Bevis were Fowles's favorite books as a child. He was an only child until he was 16 years old. Education During 1939, Fowles won a position at Bedford School, a two-hour train journey north of his home. His time at Bedford coincided with the Second World War. Fowles was a student at Bedford until 1944. He became Head Boy and was also an athletic standout: a member of the rugby-football third team, the Fives first team and captain of the cricket team, for which he was bowler. After leaving Bedford School during 1944, Fowles enrolled in a Naval Short Course at Edinburgh University. Fowles was prepared to receive a commission in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on 8 May 1945 — VE Day.

Fowles was assigned instead to Okehampton Camp in the countryside near Devon for two years. During 1947, after completing his military service, Fowles entered New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he stopped studying German and concentrated on French for his BA. Fowles was undergoing a political transformation. Upon leaving the marines he wrote, "I ... began to hate what I was becoming in life—a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist." It was also at Oxford that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing, like Fowles', was motivated from a feeling that the world was wrong. Teaching Career Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers.

At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said, "Of course, I went against all the dictates of common sense and took the Greek job." During 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetsai, a critical part of Fowles's life, as the island which would later serve as the setting of his novel The Magus. Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside of the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow exiles. But during 1953 Fowles and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England. On the island of Spetsai, Fowles had grown fond of Elizabeth Christy, who was married to one of the other teachers.

Christy's marriage was already ending because of the relationship with Fowles, and though they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company. It was during this period that Fowles began drafting The Magus . His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1954 they were married and Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. After his marriage, Fowles taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries for nearly ten years at St. Godric's College, an all-girls in Hampstead, London. Writing Career During late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector . He finished his first draft in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published during 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard.

The success of his novel meant that Fowles was able to stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. The Collector became a film in 1965. Against the counsel of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second book published be The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work, The Magus (1965), based in part on his experiences in Greece. During 1965 Fowles left London, moving to a farm, Underhill, in Dorset, where the isolated farm house became the model for "The Dairy" in the book Fowles was then writing, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). The farm was too remote, "total solitude gets a bit monotonous," Fowles remarked, and during 1968 he and his wife moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he lived in Belmont House, also used as a setting for parts of The French Lieutenant's Woman. In the same year, he adapted The Magus for cinema.

The film version of The Magus (1968) was generally considered awful; when Woody Allen was asked whether he'd make changes in his life if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he jokingly replied he'd do "everything exactly the same, with the exception of watching The Magus." The French Lieutenant's Woman was made into a film during 1981 with a screenplay by the British playwright Harold Pinter (who would later receive a Nobel laureate in Literature) and was nominated for an Oscar. Later Years Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1981), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House. His wife Elizabeth died in 1990. Fowles became a member of the Lyme Regis community, serving as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979–1988, retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke. Fowles was involved occasionally in politics in Lyme Regis, and occasionally wrote letters to the editor advocating preservation.

Despite this involvement, Fowles was generally considered reclusive. In 1998, he was quoted in the New York Times Book Review as saying, "Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation." Fowles, with his second wife Sarah by his side, died in Axminster Hospital, 5 miles from Lyme Regis on 5 November 2005. (From Wikipedia.) The French Lieutenant's Woman Remind Me The French Lieutenant's Woman After several false starts by some of the era's most respected directors, the film version of John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman finally got off the ground in 1978 when Karel Reisz agreed to take on the responsibility. As far back as 1969, Fowles had asked Reisz, a member of Britain's Angry Young Man generation of filmmakers, to direct the film, but he declined. A succession of big name contenders followed, including Fred Zinnemann who owned the rights to a script by Dennis Potter, Mike Nichols, Lindsay Anderson, Franklin Schaffner, Michael Cacoyannis, and Richard Lester.

However, all seemed daunted by the novel's self-reflexive properties, and many did not make it to preproduction before dropping out. When Reisz finally agreed to direct the film at Fowles's second request, he recognized the difficulties of turning such a complex novel into a Hollywood movie. The plot of the book is a Victorian-style romance that relates the tragedy of Sarah Woodruff, an enigmatic young woman ostracized by her village because of her affair with a French officer who has abandoned her. Biologist Charles Smithson falls under Sarah's melancholy spell and breaks his engagement to a woman from a prominent family in order to pursue their scandalous relationship. While the story takes place in the 19th century, Fowles adopts a 20th-century perspective in the narration, interrupting the story with observations, descriptions, and allusions from a modern point of view. The 19th- century plot and setting entertain the readers, while the contemporary perspective prevents them from total emersion into the narrative or complete identification with the characters. This distancing device is not only the strength of the novel but its defining characteristic. Attempting to duplicate cinematically the novel's most talked-about characteristic became an enormous challenge for Reisz.

Reisz and Fowles found the perfect screenwriter to help tackle this problem -- Harold Pinter -- primarily because of the playwright's mastery of narrative structure, layered meaning, and nuanced dialogue. Pinter's screenplays for Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater (1964), and the reworking of his own play The Caretaker (1964) showcased his ability to write dialogue with subtext in which characters converse about their ordinary lives in ways that reveal something deeper. The inner nature of his characters, which motivates their lives and impacts their relationships, lies just beneath the surface of everyday routines and commonplace conversations. Fowles had always admired Pinter's work and wanted him as the principal screenwriter from the beginning of the project. Ultimately, Pinter gave the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman its most talked-about feature -- a double story in which one thread follows the 19th-century romance of Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson while the other tracks the modern-day affair of Mike and Anna, two actors playing Charles and Sarah in a film production of the novel.

Jeremy Irons stars as Mike and Charles, while Meryl Streep garnered a third Academy Award nomination as Sarah/Anna. The idea to embed the modern story of two actors playing the roles of Charles and Sarah into the Victorian melodrama was Reisz's contribution to the screenplay, but Pinter conceived the characters of Mike and Anna, structured their story into the principal action, and gave their romance purpose and meaning. Just as the intrusion of a 20th century perspective interferes with the readers' total immersion into the 19th century romance in the novel, the dual romance in the film -- one set in the past and the other the present -- becomes a distancing device that prevents viewers from completely identifying with Sarah and Charles and sympathizing with their plight. It undermines the ability of Hollywood cinema to spin illusion, reminding viewers that they are watching a piece of fiction on film and prompting them to think about the events and characters instead of embracing them as romantic fantasy. In addition, the juxtaposition of specific scenes of Charles and Sarah with Mike and Anna offer critical commentary on manners and sexual mores. The present comments on the past, while the past illuminates the present. Mike and Anna's first scene together finds them in bed asleep.

They are suddenly awakened by Anna's call to the set by a crew member, who obviously knows that the two are romantically involved despite being married to others. Anna casually remarks, "They'll think I'm a whore," and Mike jokes, "You are." Later, when Sarah confides to Charles about the scandal that ruined her reputation as a governess and condemned her to servant status, she dramatically wails, "I am the French lieutenant's whore" in contrast to the lightness of the earlier conversation. In another scene, Anna researches the plight of single women in the Victorian era when a reputation, job, or marriage turned sour often meant hitting the streets as a prostitute. The impact of the dialogue she speaks as Sarah now becomes more personal for her. The juxtaposition of past and present also comments on the nature of the two couples' relationships. Mike and Anna's modern sexually fueled romance points up the repressed manners and sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age, while Charles and Sarah's attempts to suppress their feelings eventually erupt in a physical passion that reveals the lack of intensity in Mike and Anna's relationship. Pinter's nuanced dialogue takes on layered meaning in the contrast of characters and events from the past and present.

At a tense lunch hosted by Mike and his wife, Anna's partner David asks the actor which ending will be used for the film. Fowles's original novel had famously featured two endings, one happy and one tragic. Frustrated over his relationship with Anna, who is pulling back from their affair, and jealous of David, Mike seems not to know whether the film ends happily or tragically. On the surface, the dialogue is about the outcome of Charles and Sarah's relationship, but the subtext is about the love triangle between Mike, David, and Anna. Just as Mike doesn't know the ending of the movie, he also doesn't know whether the outcome with Anna will end happily for him. Comparisons of Pinter's screenplay to Fowles's original novel dominated the press coverage of The French Lieutenant's Woman, with some reviewers complimenting the inclusion of the modern story while others criticized it. The spotlight on Pinter's screenplay drew reviewers' attention away from the contributions of the cast and other members of the creative team, though many garnered awards. Pinter may have written the interlacing scenes between the Victorian and contemporary eras, but it was director Karel Reisz and editor John Bloom who cut them together.

The scenes are edited into a deliberate though not obvious structure. The film opens with Anna getting into her makeup as Sarah, then 25 scenes pass before we see another one set in the contemporary era. After that point, the modern scenes come more rapidly. During one sequence, the cutting back and forth between the 19th and 20th centuries is so rapid that each era is reduced to a single shot that lasts only a few seconds. The sequence cuts back and forth between Charles suffering the consequences of his scandalous relationship with Sarah and Anna in London with her partner David. The fast cutting accentuates the turmoil that Charles experiences in his scene but it creates the turmoil in Anna's, foreshadowing her decision to break off the relationship with Mike. Though Reisz's films are not known for showy editing, his understanding of the aesthetics of montage was revealed in his 1953 book The Technique of Editing. Freddie Francis, Britain's premiere cinematographer who worked with the best directors on both sides of the Atlantic, gave each era a different look.

The 19th century story is set in the old Victorian town of Lyme Regis, which has a harbor and a breakwater called the Cobb that juts out into the sea. Lyme Regis on the south coast of England boasts picturesque cliffs and dense forests. Francis used long shots in deep focus to capture the stormy atmosphere of the harbor and accentuate the virgin beauty of the forests, with figures often standing alone against the elements. The film's most famous shot is the haunting image of Sarah Woodruff on the edge of the Cobb as the wind and waves swirl around her. The cinematography of 19th century Lyme Regis contrasts with the modern scenes, which tend to feature tight shots of the characters in bland surroundings. Despite five Academy Award nominations, The French Lieutenant's Woman suffered from lukewarm reviews, with most critics unable to adequately interpret the purpose of the modern characters in a Victorian story. But, over 25 years later, the film's self-reflexive narrative, fine craftsmanship, and stellar acting showcase Pinter, Reisz, Francis, Streep, and Irons at the top of their game.

Producer: Leon Clore Screenplay: Harold Pinter based on the novel by John Fowles Cinematography: Freddie Francis Book Review: John Fowles " The French Lieutenants Woman" Book Review: John Fowles " The French Lieutenants Woman" Updated on March 13, 2016 Background Everybody likes good books. I also like to read good literature, even if it has erotic content. One of the books that I like immensely is the French Lieutenants Woman. This book written by John Fowles is consisdered a classic and has also been filmed by Hollywood. John Fowles was an English writer from England ( 1926-2005). He is considered a top drawer novelist who wrote many books like A Maggot, The Ebony Tower, Mantissa, The Magus and many more. His most famous novel is The French Lieutenants Woman. Just for the record ' The Times ' rated Fowles as one of the 50 greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century. The Idea of the Novel All writers are influenced by some other greater writer and Fowles was no exception.

Now we know that he was greatly influenced by two of the greatest names in literature and philosophy namely Alber Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. By coincidence both these writers are from France. Fowles thus felt great affinity with French culture. Fowles wrote the book " the French Lieutenants Woman" in an atmosphere more prevalent in France. The book is in a way erotic literature and one can bracket it as similar to another great piece of erotic writing " Venus in India" by Charles Devereaux. The book creates a world of passion and recreates sex during the Victorian age when it was not the norm to discuss sex openly and everybody talked about it in hushed tones. It is to the credit of the author, that he recreated the exact atmosphere of that era and time. The novel was published in 1969 and was a best seller. Generally experts feel that this novel is inspired by a 1823 novel titled Ourika by Claire de Duras. Ourika is the tale of a young slave girl from Senegal( this was a French colony earlier) who is raised by a rich family in France just after the French revolution.

The themes of love and despair are common to both the books, but Fowles cannot be accused of plagiarism of any kind. His is an original work. Fowles like the novel Ourika , has set his novel in the 19th century. It requires great talant and art to recreate the atmosphere of that period, but Fowles successfully creates a most enticing and authentic scenario. This is the strong point of the novel which runs into 467 pages. I have read the book twice and both times it read better like old wine. The Plot Charles falls in love with the girl and one day he goes up and talks to her. The ice is broken and despite objections from his fiancee he begins to meet Sarah. He becomes infatuated with her and longs to posses her.The depiction of these emotions are a tribute to Fowles and a reader who has been in love can appreciate the wonderful world created by Fowles. The story move forward as Sarah injures her ankle in a fall and Charles goes to meet her. The stage is now set for an explosive act. During this visit he seduces Sarah and makes ferocious love to her.

It is sublime love, accentuated by the fact that Sarah is in reality a virgin. Passion rises further at this discovery as Charles realizes that all tales about Sarah being a whore are false. He repeatedly loves Sarah and forgets about his betrothed. Fowles has created a lovely tale in a Victorian setting, but the greatness of the book is towards the end as Fowles leaves two plausable endings. The first is that Charles and Sarah love each other and his uncle marries again, a young girl who gives him a child and Charles loses his inheritence. But Sarah leaves him and later Charles realizes that he loves Sarah and goes in search for her. He finds her in London and learns that she has a child from him. Love truimphs and both are united. The second ending is also plausible as Sarah leaves and later Charles searches for her. But she is cold now and is disinterested in the relationship. Charles is heart broken and can do nothing. He migrates to America. Both endings are part of the novel and Fowles deserves credit for creating a new genre in literature of multiple endings. Last Word The novel is an out and out love story.

The hero is a man named Charles Smithson, who is successful in his life. He is a go getter and generally treats life as a great gift. To top it he is young and only 32. He has fetching looks and demeanor. But he is terribly lucky as his uncle who is childless leaves him a grand legacy. Nothing can be better for a young man than this and on top of it he is engaged to be married to a nice young lady named Ernestina Freeman. Fowles creates a love between the couple as they walk along the sea coast and beach. The writer has a ace up his sleeve and this is where his novel takes off like a rocket. During these walks, when sometimes the couple kiss fevershly, they espy a forlorn woman sitting alone on the ramparts of the beach. Her name is Sarah and Charles is intrigued about her. He makes inquiries and comes to know that perhaps the girl Sarah is a whore. On further inquiry he learns that Sarah is an unfortunate girl who had a lover earlier, a French Naval officer. This man had abandoned Sarah and run away and perhaps that was the reason that she had become a whore.

The story does not gel with Charles and when he repeatedly sees the girl he begins to feel a close affinity with her. The novel makes compelling reading. In 2005 this novel was rated by Time Magazine as among the 100 great novels of the last century. An accolade well deserved. Fowles has a permanent place in English literature and I am sure another 100 years down the line, Fowles will not be forgotton. Fowles writes simple English unlike the difficult prose of James Joyce. He has a natural flair for writing and captivates the reader. Hollywood has cashed in on the popularity of the novel and produced a lovely film with Meryl Streep as Sarah. For thos who are unable to read the book, the second option is to see the film. Its agreat piece of emotional entertainment. More by this Author Here is a novel by MG Singh titled " Romance of the Frontier', a work of fiction in the genre of Harold Robbins. A wonderful tale of erotic love and adventure in a violent scenario. 10 Patricia is an American author who writes novels within a bizarre setting.

Her book FairGame is centered on warewolves and though an implausable tale is a thriller 0 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles & the Saving Grace of Art | CG FEWSTON The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles & the Saving Grace of Art · by CG FEWSTON · in Fiction . · The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles is a book I keep coming back to with a fondness that overwhelms me upon opening the first page and overflows to the last line written. The language Fowles creates haunts me on sunny days beside an ocean where I know the world to be anything but ordinary. I am not sure why this book holds such an impression on me (though I do attempt to explain it here), because books should not be so powerful… should they? The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a love story between a wealthy scientist named Charles (no doubt after Charles Darwin which is referenced a few times throughout the book) and Sarah, a woman without home or family in the 1860s.

The two are an unlikely match: Charles is engaged to be married to Ernestina, daughter to a successful businessman—a class below Charles’s stature as gentleman—and Sarah, a commoner, is overshadowed by town rumors as the whore who belonged to a Frenchman who abandoned her. But if appearances and perceptions, as in life, should be questioned, then nothing is ever as it seems in this Victorian romance that, unlike a majority of books, has two endings for the reader to choose from—but written in such a way that the reader believes both endings are as real as the beginning and both endings deserve a place in the imagination. So where should I begin to introduce you, or reintroduce you, to Sarah and Charles? I shall go to the first passages I underlined in the book, and the first time Charles sees Sarah standing on the edge of a cliff looking out to sea as if she were a bird left behind by her flock. John Fowles (1926-2005) “So they went closer to the figure by the cannon bollard.

She had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black coat—which was bizarre, more like a man’s riding coat than any woman’s coat that had been in fashion those past forty years. She too was a stranger to the crinoline; but it was equally plain that that was out of oblivion, not knowledge of the latest London taste. Charles made some trite and loud remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. The couple moved to where they could see her face in profile; and how her stare was aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon… “It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or taste. But it was as an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask: and above all, no sign of madness.

The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert” (p 9-10). And by the end of Chapter Two Fowles has the reader hooked and there’s little doubt in mind that Sarah exists and Charles will, must, come to her one day—if not for his sake then for the reader’s. Since Time (Fowles once called it a room) is relative—especially by this book’s end—let us skip to the last passage I underlined and see the transformation of the young hero who has broken his engagement, lost his reputation and found a powerful love in the eyes of another. “At last she looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears, and her look unbearably naked.

Such looks we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but love, here, now, in these two hands’ joining, in this blind silence in which one head comes to rest beneath the other; and which Charles, after a compressed eternity, breaks, though the question is more breathed than spoken. “‘Shall I ever understand your parables?’ The language, as illustrated, I hope you find as breathtaking as I do, and the above selected passages, albeit a few, do quickly map out the journey—if it is one you wish to take—of two lovers who must overcome not only their torn hearts but their conflicting status in society.

But before I go, let me offer a momentary insight into Fowles’s symbolism: which often has a hand in religion (as it did in Daniel Martin ) and the images most often associated with Christianity (as in the particular reference to “parables”)—let us look closely, then, at one last passage, which is as relevant today as it might have been in 1867: “For a moment he could not seize it—and then it came. “To uncrucify! “In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit—the redemption of sins—to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man could descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women.

“He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him: and it was totally without love or freedom…but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils! “He had become, while still alive, as if dead. “It was like coming to a bottomless brink” (p 363). So this is where I’ve decided to leave you—upon the brink. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles is a true work of art and a testament to what a mind can create if given the chance in a machine-world filled with machine-minds.

Let us hold onto love and beauty, despite the raw brutality and cruelty most often found in religions and politics. Art is what will save us in the end. Keep reading and smiling… More Books By John Fowles CG FEWSTON in Hong Kong CG FEWSTON at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China PAPA HEMINGWAY in Hong Kong CG FEWSTON is an American novelist who is a member of AWP, a member of Americans for the Arts , and a professional member and advocate of the PEN American Center , advocating for the freedom of expression around the world. CG FEWSTON has travelled across continents and visited such places as Mexico, the island of Guam, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Taipei and Beitou in Taiwan, Bali in Indonesia, and Guilin and Shenzhen and Beijing in China. He also enjoys studying and learning French, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Mandarin. CG FEWSTON earned an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership and Administration (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors) from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A.

in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of In the Evil Day , October 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish , 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks , 2012; and, The Convalescent , 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer , 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World , 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless , 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home , 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy , 2014).

Among many others, CG FEWSTON’S stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Sediments Literary–Arts Journal, Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, GNU Journal (“Hills Like Giant Elephants”), Tendril Literary Magazine, Prachya Review (“The One Who Had It All”), Driftwood Press, The Missing Slate Literary Magazine (“Darwin Mother”), Gravel Literary Journal, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer, Moonlit Road, Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre , “The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about CG FEWSTON and his writing at A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN won GOLD for Literary Classics’ 2015 best book in the category under ”Special Interest” for “Gender Specific – Female Audience”… Finalist in the 2015 Chatelaine Awards for Romantic Fiction… Finalist in the 2015 Mystery & Mayhem Novel Writing Contest… John Fowles (Author of The Magus) Literature & Fiction Influences edit data John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 

40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England.

He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since." Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by 1947 he had decided that the military life was not for hi John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since." Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18.

After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by 1947 he had decided that the military life was not for him. Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer. Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head. The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles.

During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy. In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing. The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus - drafts of which Fowles had been working on for over a decade - was published. A The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner.

In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects--including a series of essays on nature--and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history. In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forwards/afterwords to other writers' novels. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations. Since 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis. His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

Wormholes, a book of essays, was published in May 1998. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year (followed recently by volume two). John Fowles died on November 5, 2005 after a long illness. ...more John Fowles | The Independent Virtuoso author of 'The Collector', 'The Magus' and 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' Tuesday 8 November 2005 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online In the course of one week in 1977, the writer John Fowles received a total of half a million dollars as an advance for his novel Daniel Martin and in option money for the film version of his 1969 best-seller The French Lieutenant's Woman. His two previous best-sellers, The Collector and The Magus, had already been Hollywood films (both terrible, alas). For two decades, Fowles was unique among English writers in combining literary sensibility with mass popularity.

He was born in 1926, at Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex. His father, Robert, had trained as a solicitor before the First World War but had been obliged to enter the family tobacco-shop business. His mother, Gladys, was a schoolteacher. Robert Fowles commuted to London each day in bowler hat and suit to run the shops, but he also had a passion for philosophy - the great German and American pragmatists - and some poetry. He had written his own novel about his Great War experiences - in later years he asked his son if it might be publishable. It wasn't, but John Fowles used fragments of his father's battlefield descriptions in a passage of The Magus. However, Fowles was scornful of his parents and his suburban upbringing, of "This so dull life, mingled with hate and annoyance and pity", as he wrote in his journal when he was 23 and still living at home. He fervently disliked the "nullity" and "dwarfed existence" of his parents. "Their crassness horrified me," he said. Fowles was educated at Alleyn Court School and Bedford School.

Although he later complained about the brutality of the latter, he was apparently a model pupil and an outstanding cricketer. During the school holidays, Fowles joined his parents in Devon, to which the family had been evacuated. (He later recreated his time there in passages of Daniel Martin.) There he could express his passion for the natural world. This enthusiasm for natural history had been nurtured early, thanks to an uncle who was an entomologist and two cousins, one of whom was an authority on ants. For the last year of the Second World War Fowles attended Edinburgh University, then did 18 months' military service as a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, an experience he loathed. It was there that he began keeping a journal. In 1947 he resumed his studies at New College, Oxford, where he read German and French. Here he dreamed of "enduring literary fame" and showed himself to be both an intellectual snob and a Francophile. He spent his university vacations in the South of France and after graduation taught at the university of Poitiers.

Then, late in 1951, fatefully, he took up a teaching job for two years at the Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai. The experience changed his life. There he fell for Elizabeth Christy, the wife of a fellow teacher. Back in London in 1953, Elizabeth left her husband and, reluctantly, her two-year-old daughter, Anna, for Fowles. However, whilst she was living in poverty in London, Fowles was working at a finishing school in Hertfordshire where, over the next year, he had relationships with two pupils in quick succession (one of whom became the model for Lily in The Magus). At the same time, he was telling Elizabeth that, though he wanted a relationship with her, he did not want to be responsible for her daughter. "It would not even be enough to leave Anna," he said. "You would have to leave the guilt behind as well." John Fowles and Elizabeth Christy married in April 1954. Anna stayed with her father. The loss to Elizabeth was made more poignant by the fact that she and Fowles could not have children of their own.

Over the years that followed, mother and daughter did meet on occasion and eventually forged a meaningful relationship. Fowles continued his teaching career in north London at St Godric's College. He taught there until 1963, ultimately as head of department, but was writing all the time. In 1953 he had submitted a novel about Greece - "An Island and Greece" - to an agent (Paul Scott, later a successful novelist himself), but it had been rejected. This was not a prototype for The Magus. He had been working on that, too, as an overtly supernatural work in the style of The Turn of the Screw. The Magus was first called "The Godgame". Both narrative and mood, as Fowles later wrote "went through countless transformations" over the years. All versions shared the same basic plot, however, in which a young English schoolmaster, Nicholas Urfe, ditches his girlfriend (based on Elizabeth) and goes to teach on a lonely Greek island. There he meets the wealthy, mysterious Maurice Conchis and is drawn into the old man's Godgames through his infatuation with an alluring girl.

(Originally, he had intended to make Conchis a woman, but had a failure of nerve.) Fowles was strongly influenced when writing The Magus by a now little-known novel, Richard Jefferies's Bevis (1882), and, more overtly, by Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) - its sadness for a lost magical world chimed in with his own feelings about leaving Spetsai. Fowles had put "The Godgame" to one side and was working on "Tessera", a novel about two people who have fallen in love with Greece and are living in permanent exile from it, when he had the idea for a short potboiler. (He had about nine other unpublished novels in his drawer by this time too.) He wrote the first draft of The Collector, in which a clerk with a passion for collecting butterflies kidnaps an art student he desires, in four weeks. (Fowles later confessed that a favourite fantasy of his involved "imprisoning women underground".) It was published in 1963 to almost unanimous critical acclaim and turned two years later into a commercially successful film starring Terence Stamp.

Fowles's experiences when he went briefly to Hollywood to work on the script later formed part of the background to Daniel Martin. Fowles was catapulted to fame and fortune - the film rights to The Magus were sold before he had even finished it. In 1964 he began collating and rewriting all the previous drafts of The Magus. A virtuoso piece of storytelling, it was published in 1965 and, despite critical reservations, was an immediate popular success, especially with students. He wrote in the foreword to a revised version published in 1977: I now know the generation whose mind it most attracts. And that it must always substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. The film that followed, in 1968, starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn, was notoriously bad and rendered even more infamous by a Woody Allen joke: "If I had to live my life again, I'd do everything the same, except that I wouldn't see The Magus." By then Fowles and his wife were living in Dorset, first at Underhill Farm, a mile and a half along the coast from Lyme Regis, with a spectacular view out to sea.

Returning from a trip to London one day, they found that one of their fields and a number of trees had disappeared; they had slipped into the sea. Elizabeth hated Dorset - she was lonely and depressed in the winters. Fowles had wanted to move to France - his study of French had helped form him and he always thought of himself as a European rather than an English novelist - but instead they bought Bunter's Castle, a roomy house in Lyme Regis with a late 18th-century façade, dubious past reputation and an enormous walled, wooded garden. They moved there in 1968. Fowles later said of Elizabeth: "She was working-class, really, the intelligent, emancipated working class," he once explained: I'm a middle-class child. I was brought up under all the wrong lights and all the wrong principles and it was Elizabeth who taught me what nonsense all that is. She was also his muse - the inspiration for pretty much all the unknowable, enigmatic women in his fiction - and a ruthless editor of his work. She made cuts and drastic changes, was derisive of his attempts at playwriting and changed the endings of his novels.

On one occasion she said he had a "Woman's Own style". For better or worse, it was she who insisted on the two alternative endings for Fowles's most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). That novel started with a dream - Fowles firmly believed in the power of the writer's unconscious for creating fiction: "You should give yourself to your imagination." He often recorded his dreams. A recurring one he had on the threshold of sleep was that of a woman standing on the Cobb (Lyme's vast manmade breakwater which could be clearly seen from his garden). He didn't know why she was there so he wrote the novel to find out. She became the anti-heroine Sarah Woodruff, a governess isolated by the local community for her rumoured former liaison with a French naval officer. The French Lieutenant's Woman did as well as its predecessor, a success compounded three years later by an accomplished film version, starring Meryl Streep, scripted by Harold Pinter and nominated for five Oscars. Fowles's confounding of normal narrative expectations at the ending of The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and, later, A Maggot, frustrated readers but excited critics.

However, it might well have had less to do with critical theory or Elizabeth's interventions than with indecisiveness. He told me cheerfully several years ago, I've never been able to finish a novel in my life. I always have ideas for endings, think I've got the whole thing locked up, then - bugger me - along comes some last-minute idea. As a result, Fowles was famously reluctant to let go of his novels at all. One of his publishers suggested he was like a miser, counting over his gold. By 1970, Elizabeth had become so forceful in her criticisms - particularly of a thriller, The Devices, that Fowles had just written - that her husband never invited her to comment on his work in progress again. Over the next two decades Fowles published only four works of fiction: The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985). He used to talk of novels being "brewed": It means you write the idea or the main part of it in a given period.

Then you have to let it lie, like a good beer, and it gathers strength, gathers flavour, all the rest of it, over time. The title story of the short-story collection The Ebony Tower was later, in 1984, filmed for television starring Laurence Olivier and Greta Scacchi. Daniel Martin, his semi-autobiographical novel covering 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, had mixed reviews, while Mantissa got a very rocky ride. He wrote this fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse as a squib against the "gods" of postmodernism. The muse was, of course, his wife Elizabeth. "Muse is rather a silly word," he said. "But Elizabeth was behind all my female characters and she was my muse in the sense of a complement, a kind of counterpart." In Daniel Martin, the central character is involved with two women, one young, one old. The older woman was Elizabeth, although she didn't realise it. "When Elizabeth first read it, she said she hated that woman," he recalled. A Maggot was seen as a triumphant return to form.

An odd combination of an 18th-century mystery, science fiction and history that transmutes into a religious tract, it too came from a single image of travellers riding along a skyline. In addition to these published works of fiction, he was, however, writing much else. Fowles also translated Don Juan, Lorenzaccio, The Lottery of Love and Martine from the French for the National Theatre. He wrote a number of screenplays, including one for an Ira Levin thriller, Dr Cook's Garden (1971). He wrote the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979). In 1984 he had the idea for "In Hellugula", about a woman who at the start of the novel is trapped in a foreign country when the Second World War breaks out. "I've never been able to work out what my female characters are likely to do," he said later. He worked on the novel on and off - he admitted he was "atrociously lazy" - until, in 1989, he suffered a stroke that left him frail and slow in speech.

The novel has never been published. His wife, meanwhile, was suffering frequent bouts of depression and escaping to London with increasing frequency. Then, in 1990, Elizabeth died of cancer only a week after it had been diagnosed. Her death left him bereft. Fowles didn't write for a year. Ill-health dogged him thereafter, although, with the help of his stepdaughter and several other women whose presence inspired him, he was able eventually to resume writing. In the early Nineties Paramount asked him to write a script for Le Grand Meaulnes. He also began working again on his early novel "Tessera", hoping to ready it for publication four decades after he began it. However, because he had written it in "a Joycean frame of mind", there was no clear narrative development. Again, the book never appeared. In 1998 he published a collection of essays, Wormholes. For the previous eight years he had engaged in a number of relationships with much younger women but that year he married a family friend, Sarah Smith, daughter of Major Peter Smith, founder Secretary of the Jockeys Association.

She took charge of him, breaking contact for him with some of his women friends and caring for him through illness. "I never thought I would find someone who weighed as much with me as my first wife." Early in 1999 another producer tried to bring Daniel Martin into production. Rose Tremain was commissioned to write a script and Anthony Hopkins was approached to play the eponymous central character. Fowles was becoming increasingly frail - he had had a stroke in 1988 and heart surgery. Almost since his move to Lyme Regis, he had been reclusive, at odds with the modern world and jealous of his privacy. It seems ironic then that his last work to appear was the most private - his Journals, the first volume published in 2003, the second last week. He said: I just hope they give a detailed picture of what I have been . . . I do not begin to understand my own personality myself. Peter Guttridge The French lieutenant's woman. (Book, 1969) [WorldCat.org] The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at Title: The French lieutenant's woman.

Author: John Fowles Publisher: London, Cape, 1969. ISBN/ISSN: 0224616544 9780224616546 OCLC:25647 The ReCaptcha terms you entered were incorrect. Please try to match the 2 words shown in the window, or try the audio version. the french lieutenant’s woman | 101 Books Revisiting “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” Today’s kind of a lazy post, but it’s relevant. Many critics, and even A.S. Byatt herself, have acknowledged Possession is a response to John Fowles’ 1969 novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. So before we jump into Possession, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the story that provoked A.S. Byatt to write her novel in the first place. The French Lieutenant’s Woman currently sits at #27 in my rankings of the first 68 books I’ve read from the Time list. Before I read the novel, I thought I wouldn’t like it—thinking of it as a Victorian romance.

And it is partly that, but to dismiss it that easily does a great disservice to John Fowles. The man was excellent at his craft. So instead of me babbling on and on about a book I read nearly three years ago, I thought I’d just repost that review here today. It’s been awhile, so just reading this review again reminded me of why I enjoyed The French Lieutenant’s Woman so much. And, hopefully, Possession will prove to be as interesting.

Question: Who wrote the book "The French Lieutenant's Woman" in 1969?
Answer: John Fowles